


Burnt Offerings

by Merovignian



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Arthur Nolan (mentioned), Doubt, Eugene Vanderstock (mentioned), Gen, Gertrude Robinson (mentioned), Jack Barnabas (mentioned), Jude Perry (mentioned) - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-31
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-02-28 16:41:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23410402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merovignian/pseuds/Merovignian
Summary: Sometimes Agnes wonders if she could just take the candles and run.
Kudos: 15





	Burnt Offerings

The parcels arrive by post. It's the only mail she ever gets.

Agnes does not rush to open them; there's no real need. She's not particularly enthused to receive these packages, wrapped in brown paper and sent by second-class mail. She sits listlessly for a time, lethargy and perhaps some lingering rebelliousness from her childhood years leading her to ignore the boxes that sit by her door.

But that's not the only reason she ignores them. Half the time, she doesn't need them.

Eugene is a pain; a liability, Arthur calls him. Left to his own devices he would cause nothing but trouble; causing messes that needed clearing up, picking fights with the representatives of powers they would rather court. Better, the others say, to keep him occupied with make-work. It's an open secret. She has a feeling even Eugene knows it.

Oh, Agnes needs to feed. Don't get her wrong. But for every candle filled with suffering and loss she inbibes, many more of Eugene's sacrifices go unlit, a new package arriving before the last is even half-done. Over the decades she's built up quite the stash; she estimates she could get by for a good ten years based on what she has piled up in her wardrobe, beneath the floorboards, under the bed.

There should be more, but every time the other members of the Flame arrive at her little apartment for one tiresome reason or another, some go missing. It won't be until she's almost dead that she starts to guess why.

She once tried going without, when she was younger, but after a month or three she felt her eyelids drooping and her hair snap like crumbled candlewicks as she ran her hands through it, felt her life and energy sputtering and guttering out. The others didn't even comment on it, save for a contented smirk on Arthur's face when finally she lit one of Eugene's tallow offerings and inhaled the smoke as it burned with no flame. She did not try again.

Later, in that strange November when she starts to feel curious and even rebellious again, she counts the candles properly. It's impossible to know for sure how long each will last; they are not created equal, burning dependent on how much loss, how many crushed dreams were generated by the death of those which made them. But as best she can determine, Agnes reckons she could stretch them out for a good thirteen years.

She starts to daydream, here and there. She could go where she wanted, really. Get a backpack to store them and just...leave. See the world. One evening she thinks maybe she could go pay a visit to the woman she's bound to by spiderwebs and fate. Then, when Jude stops by to give her the latest collection, she wonders if her minder loves her more as a god or as a woman, if she would come away with her if she asked. And when she goes out with the nice, innocent boy from the coffee shop, when she sits in an Italian restaurant eating nothing but drinking in the fresh new strangeness of normal places, of the other world where humanity lives, she wonders if she could somehow make that other world hers. 

Whatever she chooses, it's not as if she'd be abandoning her destiny. Thirteen years is plenty of time for Gertrude to die, after all, when the time comes to...

If she still _wants_ to...

Does she _have_ to...?

Ah, but that's a hard sentence to finish, so she leaves it for later.

Then the tree falls, and later never comes.

**Author's Note:**

> On the one hand, I love the imagery of the Torture Candles. On the other, the implication that they might not actually be necessary is interesting. So this is a middle ground that I felt opened up some interesting ideas.
> 
> Angst and canon death aside, this scenario also suggests the possibility of an AU where Agnes goes "fuck it" and does in fact run off to do the Desolation equivalent of watching good cows in Scotland or what have you. Isn't that a nice thought?


End file.
